Thank you, this gets to the core of the problem. Exorbitant amounts of money and effort is spent to find where the letter of the law does not match the spirit of the law. Language is messy, so it never completely will. But in cases where the spirit of the law is so obvious I’m happy when it’s enforced instead of letting them off on technicalities.
Absolutely not an expert or anything, but is it possible that the partition of your harddrive that you’re trying to install Debian on (hd0) is too small?